Dallas used to be dirt cheap not even ten years ago, but it's rapidly changing.

Personal anecdote: I remember signing my first lease on my townhouse in 2007, and I was paying $1050/month for a ~1500 sq. ft. place in a decent neighborhood in Far North Dallas. It steadily goes up every year, but this year was the biggest leap ever: my lease went up to $1334/month from $1270/month last year.

Why is everything going up? Because as our economy grows and large companies from out of state relocate their offices to Dallas, people are moving here in droves, putting a strain on available housing. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington is now the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the US. What's more is that when the housing bubble burst in 2008, housing prices in Dallas didn't go down but construction ground to a halt. During the Great Recession, housing prices stagnated instead of going down, and now that the recession's over and jobs are up, housing prices are going way up, and construction is still slow.

And it's not just Dallas; Austin has recently become very expensive, and it's probably worse there than it is here. Not sure about Houston or San Antonio, but I wouldn't be surprised if they start getting expensive soon if they aren't already. Are there other parts of Texas you can move to? Sure, if you want to be in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing to do, especially if you're used to a major metropolitan area, and very little likelihood of meeting people who share your interests. The cities in Texas are also blue islands in a sea of red, so if you're LGBT you may find yourself unwelcome in small towns, and unless you're extremely conservative you are unlikely to find people you have anything in common with. And of course you're not likely to find a job in the tech industry; I guess you'd be OK if you work remotely, but you better hope you don't ever lose your job.

If you're curious, here are some news articles on the rising housing prices in Dallas caused by the population explosion. Be warned that dallasnews.com has an easily-bypassed paywall, so you'll want to open an incognito tab for it.

http://www.dentonrc.com/news/state/2017/05/15/housing-market...

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2017/05/12/n...

https://qz.com/978602/the-main-reason-americans-are-ditching...

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/toyota/2017/05/09/plano-... (this is more about the impending traffic apocalypse than rising housing prices, but it's still worth a read)

https://www.dmagazine.com/frontburner/2017/05/the-whole-city...

And that's just what I've seen posted to /r/Dallas in the last week. I remember finding a graph of housing prices in the last 20 years or so comparing Dallas to other major cities, showing that Dallas was the only one that didn't take a huge hit in 2008, and I wish I could find it again.